F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won't.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind?

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth...

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

You've got an awfully kissable mouth.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the creative temperament--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement --discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

What are you going to do? Can't say - run for president, write - Greenwich Village? Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald